Blooming into Fall
by kinosternon
Summary: Shion comes to terms with what's happened, in his own time and in his own way. He isn't alone, and he's doing his best to put down roots in this new, hybrid world. But if he's honest with himself, there's only one person he's waiting for.


**A/N: Set a vague amount of time after the end of the anime. This started out as an excuse to angst in somebody else's head, but did eventually grow a plot. It's...not completely finished (and I really should know better), but there's enough already written that I'm comfortable starting to post. **

**I apologize if this first chapter is especially fragmented, but I started a lot of angles trying to build the groundwork for this chapter. It's also kind of a coda to my last NO. 6 fic, "Splitting at the Ends,  
"but they should stand separately, too.**

* * *

After everything, Inukashi stays one of his best friends, which Shion hadn't known if he could expect.

They're badly spooked at first, hiding on their own, and their dogs won't let anyone, friend or not, into the hotel. But they eventually let Shion in, and he, they don't turn him away, and end up warming to him again gradually, when he continues not to mention anything about that day.

Inukashi's a lot like their charges. Actions are what speak, not words.

(And honestly, Shion has his own reasons to keep silent. If Inukashi had seen his actions, that day...the dogs probably would have run him off the first time he came back to say hello.)

Rikiga, too, stays in touch. He comes by, sometimes, when he takes Baby Safu (he calls her a different name each time) down to the dog hotel and washes the dogs, for old time's sake. He stays out of the sudsy water, occasionally deigning to dandle the baby over his knee, and drinks from his hip flask. Less than before, a bit. Maybe.

He seems more enchanted by Shion than by Karan at this point, which Shion hadn't expected. He wonders where it started, but eventually shrugs and accepts it. It's easier on his mother, and he doesn't mind. It's a little weird, but Rikiga's actually pretty good about boundaries, no matter what he might have been like before. (Or when they first met, for that matter.) He promises that he's stayed mostly on the straight and narrow, treats the women well. Shion, at least for the moment, is inclined to believe him, though he still has his misgivings.

(He still doesn't know how he feels about sex work in general, and people in Rikiga's role in particular; but if there's one thing he's learned from his time with Nezumi, it's that the best first step in situations like these is rarely just butting in.)

Rikiga still likes to hear about what Karan is up to, though, and Shion does his best to explain how things have been, and a little bit about the town that used to be NO.6, based on the basic newspapers and fliers that have begun to circulate. They aren't _not_ coming to the former outside of the city, but it is a bit of a trip. Most of the people that are interested have moved to the center.

Which makes Shion something of Rikiga's contact. It's probably the closest he gets to getting involved with all of it.

At Rikiga's suggestion, though, he does try getting onto one of the limited-access computers in the rebuilt library, reading up on the structure of the city, trying to keep himself informed.

He doesn't, entirely, want to know. But the people around him do. It feels weird not to be at least a little knowledgeable.

Not _too_ knowledgeable. Baby Safu needs looking after, the house needs cleaning, the neighbors don't all talk to themselves (though a couple do, where Shion can hear them). It's a small life, but in some ways it's bigger than what he had with Nezumi.

The kids who own Karan's and Shion's and Nezumi's old sweater come by to be read to, sometimes. Karan is enchanted with Baby Safu, and Shion promises he'll consider her babysitting offer in a few years.

He promises the same to her brother, who looks a bit embarrassed, but doesn't say no, either.

It's a quiet life. But right now, it's about as much of one as he's comfortable handling.

* * *

There are other people Shion's age, in this town either on its deathbed or in its labor pains. (Perhaps both is the most obvious conclusion.) They range from disaffected to traumatized to horrified to eager and honestly, a number of them are all of these at once.

There are some people that Shion would like to be friends with, and some people he's more or or less managing to blend in with, and those he can feel how to talk to like breathing. For the most part, those are three different groups of people.

Some of them are younger than him, so much younger that he's surprised they talk to him as an equal; others, he doesn't even realize at first are five or ten years his senior until he politely turns down drinks he's technically old enough for, not that anybody really bothers keeping count anymore.

He doesn't like to drink with them. Drinking feels...dangerous, and he thinks he might have picked up that particular inhibition from Nezumi, because he doubts he would've been worried about that, before.

(Before when, he's not sure, but ever since a single night took his house and his future away, he has been very conscious of the importance of things like discretion, and secrets.)

So he doesn't drink, and he doesn't go out at night because he likes settling baby Safu in to sleep and listening to her youthful breathing. Waking with her saves his mother from sleepless nights, but also means that he needs more hours of rest to make up for the lost time. He sleeps when the baby does.

(His mother promises him that that ends eventually, but she seems so lost when she says it, some moments. When she'd had him, she'd had more or less all the support a young mother could ask for, from machines and from hired help if not from family or loved ones. She hadn't known Safu's grandmother yet, then—not when he was Baby Safu's age. That came around the time they started introducing the most gifted and talented children to each other.)

Shion still thinks he isn't ready to know about Safu's parents, where they went or whether they're alive. Or maybe it isn't that, and more the sad eyes his mother makes when she catches him calling the baby by his dead friend's name. Maybe he really doesn't want to know, or maybe he doesn't feel he deserves it. Safu's memory, all his thoughts and feelings about her, feel like a maelstrom compressed into a small, impossibly pressurized box.

That is another reason not to drink, especially with people he cannot bring himself to trust.

He'd blame Nezumi for that, but really, the only thing Nezumi taught him is that the one he can't trust, the one he cannot let anyone else trust either, is himself.

* * *

There are other people Shion's age, in this town either on its deathbed or in its labor pains. (Perhaps both is the most obvious conclusion.) They range from disaffected to traumatized to horrified to eager—and honestly, a number of them are all of these at once.

There are some people that Shion would like to be friends with, and some people he's more or or less managing to blend in with, and those he can feel how to talk to like breathing. For the most part, those are three different groups of people.

Some of them are younger than him, so much younger that he's surprised they talk to him as an equal; others, he doesn't even realize at first are five or ten years his senior until he politely turns down drinks he's technically old enough for, not that anybody really bothers keeping count anymore.

He doesn't like to drink with them. Drinking feels...dangerous, and he thinks he might have picked up that particular inhibition from Nezumi, because he doubts he would've been worried about that, before.

(Before when, he's not sure, but ever since a single night took his house and his future away, he has been very conscious of the importance of things like discretion, and secrets.)

So he doesn't drink, and he stops going out at night because he likes settling baby Safu in to sleep and listening to her youthful breathing. Waking with her saves his mother from sleepless nights, but also means that he needs more hours of rest to make up for the lost time. He forgoes most of social events, formalized or casual, and sleeps when the baby does.

His mother promises him that that ends eventually, but she seems so lost when she says it, some moments. When she'd had him, she'd had more or less all the support a young mother could ask for, from machines and from hired help if not from family or loved ones. She hadn't known Safu's grandmother yet, then—not when he was Baby Safu's age. That came around the time they started introducing the most gifted and talented children to each other.

(Shion still thinks he isn't ready to know about old Safu's parents, where they went or whether they're alive. Or maybe it isn't that, and more the sad eyes his mother makes when she catches him calling the baby by his dead friend's name. Maybe he really doesn't want to know, or maybe he doesn't feel he deserves it. Safu's memory, all his thoughts and feelings about her, feel like a maelstrom compressed into a small, impossibly pressurized box.)

That is another reason not to drink, and really, not to go out with anyone, especially not with people he cannot bring himself to trust. And it's hard, somehow—he can trust the future of the city, on some level, but trusting someone with his secrets somehow seems much less probable.

He'd blame Nezumi for that, but really, the only thing Nezumi taught him is that the one he can't trust, the one he cannot let anyone else trust either, is himself.

* * *

What's left, between the fresh ruins of NO. 6 and the fresh ruins outside its boundaries, are people who are lost, and thrown by the specters and the footprint left by horrific violence. People that are looking for solutions, but who are not patient. Or willing to see reality, and act based on it. People that probably have never thought high-flung thoughts about how a society should operate long enough to have even the basics of a rudimentary working model...

...And the people that do find themselves drawn back into very old patterns, indeed.

Shion's mother is frightened to go to the town hall meetings, right up until she isn't. Until she's quiet and very pale, with a bit of Nezumi's old stiff back that Shion remembers from the times Nezumi couldn't quite hide that he was desperately afraid. But the high spots of indignation in her cheekbones aren't like Nezumi at all, and the way her voice breaks from its normal warmth and kindness into something a lot sharper, with a lot more straight-up adjectives and careful diction...it reminds Shion of something he's not sure he was ever alive to hear.

His mother is alive in a way that he hasn't seen in a very long time. And the other men at the table...make him glad of her, and make something rise up in him that makes him stand up with the others during a break and make apologies to his mother and not go back again.

Instead, he offers to stay in the bakery and look after Baby Safu while his mother goes to the meetings. He does so more often as she starts getting involved in more and more projects, plays secretary on his mother's bed while the baby lies in the sling they put together for her, and then sets her on the floor to practice lifting her head and keeps looking through his mother's efforts to delegate to the people that will do their jobs the most efficiently, with the greatest growth mindset.

And he is glad he isn't going. He isn't sure he wants to be in on this drug of leadership, of power, of making-a-difference-in-the-world. There needs to be someone in their home, he can't help feeling, who doesn't feel that. Someone needs to be like that, for Baby Safu's sake.

But his mother is all right, too. She reads them stories. She sits by the fire and looks through some of Safu's grandmother's old patterns, trying to make sense of them. She's frightened, but not all the time. She's angry, but not all the time. She's everything at once, and Shion cannot help but feel that he has never been so balanced.

One night, reading to baby Safu who's curled against Shion's chest, she pauses with the baby sleeping, and runs her fingers over the back of Shion's neck. "Your hair's getting really long," she says softly. "Do you want me to cut it?"

That's what they'd done at the bakery, after the first time he met Nezumi. It had never grown quite as neatly, after that. But they hadn't really been able to afford haircuts as often as he probably should have gotten them, and his mother didn't need them at all, and Shion had reasoned that he didn't really need the attention or the expense. Not with what he'd lost her, and not given he didn't really need to look good.

A good-looking park worker, after all, was a bit of an anomaly. Not that the others didn't look good, especially the younger employees (_at least one of which is dead now, dead and bald and bewildered in his death, skin desiccated and dried and a victim who in any just world should never have been touched_), but he didn't really want any attention.

The only attention he'd had—Safu—he hadn't really wanted. He hadn't worked for it. For a while, he thought it might have faded, with the time she had available to spend with him shrinking. But then there were questions, and her trip abroad, and a question part of him had hoped never to be asked, if it had conceived of it at all...

And then he had lost her forever.

Given his track record for anything that could even be remotely considered romantic attachments, it's probably a good thing that he doesn't want any more. One dead, one damaged and fleeing the hurricane that was him, apparently—better that Nezumi doesn't come back.

But he isn't ready for another set of hands in his hair. Not if they didn't have Nezumi's fine piano-fingers and blunt, squared fingernails and surprisingly strong grip, whipcord under soft silken skin.

He doesn't know if he can take being reminded of how that touch once felt.

"No, it's okay," he tells his mother. "I kind of want to see what it will do."


End file.
